A team led by University of Teesside Library & Information Services has been successful in a bid for funding of £50,000 from the JISC Next Generation Technologies and Practice Phase 2 Programme.

The team includes the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada and FE colleges in the Tees Valley including Redcar & Cleveland College and Darlington College.

The Project (called UKAN-SKILLS) will last 16 months and will look at ways in which student skills can be developed, reinforced, supported and evidenced in a planned and coordinated way during a whole academic programme. Four separate approaches to skills development have so far been prioritised by users: 1. a 'standalone module' during programme; 2. a very embedded or stealth approach; 3. a PDP approach; 4. an intensive 'module’ at the beginning as a progression bridge from previous programme). These will be looked at in joint dialogues with teaching staff in the Tees Valley and Canada. The dialogues will thus yield a wide range of planning templates that other academic programme leaders or teams in the wider community can use. Academic, employability and life skills are increasingly being recognized as vital. However, the planning and coordinating process to develop and assess them whilst making them interesting and relevant within the curriculum is complex and time-consuming, especially where the programme is very modular.

The point or times in a programme where skills are described; advocated; practised; reinforced; advised on; assessed; and fed back on will each have good practice 'learning objects' attached to them as well as links to national resources.

From September 2008 - December 2008 these templates, resources, etc will be evaluated with programme staff and students. Various good ideas and material will be stored in a new repository developed by UPEI that the University of Teesside will support for at least 5 years after the project. This will allow sustained access by the whole HE community and provide a focal point and ’habitat’ for community discussion.

Focus groups with academic staff (using the JISC UIDM approach) have identified the two priority skills of academic writing and critical thinking for use as pilot skills in the project. A freely-available UIDM toolkit will be developed as part of the project.

Paul Mayes       paul.mayes@tees.ac.uk

(skype: paulmayes   messenger : paul_mayes@hotmail.com) 

These young people have grown up with technology as an intrinsic part of their lives, and expect that this will only increase with time. Although the students we spoke to in the discussion groups were generally unsure on their expectation of university ICT provision they were quite adept at evaluating different ICT options. It would follow that if they do not know what to expect when they get there, there will not be a mismatch between expectation and reality. However the research shows that they do know instinctively what works for them and what they prefer, when they are presented with it, therefore we can assume that they will be able to take decisions about any new technology they may meet at university.

While the students expect to be able to set themselves up, technologically, in the same way that they are perhaps used to now, they will not expect either their connectivity to decrease or for the technology to encroach on what they see as the key benefits from university – interaction and learning.

The traditional methods of teacher/pupil learning seem neither hierarchical nor outmoded to them. They see personal, face to face interaction as the backbone of their learning. It would be interesting and relevant to carry out a similar study with first-year undergraduates, who have begun to appreciate the many different ways learning can happen at university, to see if opinions differ significantly and if the potential for ICT is more easily understood once they have exThis age group suspects that if all learning is mediated through technology, this will diminish the value of the learningperienced the different teacher-learner relationships of university.

I was relieved therefore  to see in last Saturday's "Times" (owned by the parent of MySpace of course) that similar things had occurred in Kent (fight clubs using Bebo), Cheshire (Bebo again) and Devon (site unspecified). So it wasn't just our particular empowering of young people !!

Paul M 

We use the very simple but effective http://artpad.art.com/artpad/painter/  site as a time-filler between sessions for our younger users. If anyone wants to submit an ArtPad picture or pictures to me (paul.mayes@tees.ac.uk) on a theme of "Emerge success criteria" there will be a new much sought-after "Edward the Aardvark Prize"